一個元資料為基礎和自訂的檔案管理軟體

Abstract

由於科技的進步，資料保存方式也由傳統的保存方式(e.g., 沖洗相片、紙張文件和音樂卡帶進步為數位保存方式 (e.g., 數位相片、電子文件和數位音樂) ，雖然資料的數位保存方式較傳統容易保存以及整理，但是當數位資料的量累積到一定程度時，管理上將遇到一些問題，如檔案的存放位置，檔案的命名等等。 以現今的微軟的檔案總管為例，當要對一個數位檔案作整理分類時，通常有兩種做法，第一種是將檔案用多重資料夾分隔儲存，並且在資料夾上註明檔案分類，或是在檔案名稱上加標籤說明，這種作法會將造成檔名太長或是資料夾結構太過複雜而造成管理上的不便，第二種則是使用微軟檔案總管本身提供的添加元資料功能，但是這種方式會受到一些限制，在微軟的檔案總管裡，能夠對檔案增加額外資料的只有少數幾種(例如 doc、mp3、jpg 等檔案)。除此之外，對能夠增加元資料的欄位是固定的，無法依照使用者意願而額外增加欄位。 基於上述幾點原因，這篇論文的目的是實作出以元資料為基礎的檔案管理軟體，能夠讓使用者任意地對檔案添加元資料，使得使用者在管理檔案上更為便利。除了對檔案建立Metadata外，我們的檔案管理軟體亦支援建立Hard Link以及Soft Link，所有連結的Metadata將與來源的Metadata相同。

It is a digital era now. Many documents, such as photos, music, movies, and paper documents, etc., have been transformed to digital files for archiving purpose. Digital files are easier to keep and duplicate and last much longer without degradation. However, managing these ever increasing digital files presents a major challenge to most users. A major problem in managing files is how to add annotations to files. Common annotations include authors, dates, versions, summaries, reader’s opinions, keywords, etc. Different kinds of documents may carry different annotations. For example, annotations for a digital photo may also include the place where a photo is taken, the photographer, the equipments used to take the photos, etc. The annotations help to organize the files and to locate desired files in a sea of files. For instance, a user may want to locate all photos taken with a specific camera. Traditional file managers allow very limited and inflexible ability for annotations. A user sometimes uses file names as annotation, such as “SW DVD5 Office Enterprise 2007 W32 ChnTrad #1 PA BP MLF.X12-19568.img”. This results very long file names. Still, long files are incapable of carrying all the desirable annotations. Based on these observations, we designed and implemented a new file manager that is centered around annotations. The new file manager provides all the necessary operations on the annotations.